An operating system platform is typically designed to allow a user as much operational freedom as possible. Therefore, any restrictions that are placed on such a platform (and its associated applications), are typically difficult to implement, since often times they go against the intended design of the platform. This difficulty may be compounded if restrictions are to be placed on applications provided by third party vendors.
Third party vendors may provide all kinds of applications, ranging from instant messenger applications, to games, to email applications. Likewise, the platform itself may provide a multitude of system applications, media applications, or web applications.
There may be various reasons why restrictions would be placed on such applications. For example, parents might want to have a mechanism for locking down content that might be deemed harmful to children. Such a mechanism could be implemented in the form of a parental control panel.
To provide such a parental control panel capability, an interface could be provided that is able to communicate with applications that are compliant with policies set forth by the parents. The policies themselves could be stored on a computing system, and any compliant application could then communicate via the interface to determine whether it should be running or not, and what features it can expose to certain users. It would therefore be desirable to introduce such an interface that can mediate between compliant applications and restriction policies set forth by administrators of a computing system.